Two months after the Obama administration promised a “moonshot” to accelerate the fight against cancer, Vice President Joe Biden summoned top health care lawmakers to a meeting in the Old Executive Office building.

Biden, whose son, Beau, died from brain cancer less than a year earlier, saw a path to fundthe initiative in Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton’s 21st Century Cures bill — a measure designed to boost funding for research on cancer and other diseases while making sweeping regulatory changes at the FDA that easily passed the House but was struggling to gain momentum in the upper chamber.

The two-hour March meeting with Biden, Upton and the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate’s health care committees was the beginning of a rare Washington partnership that would ultimately save the health care legacies of Biden and Upton, as well as key Obama administrationresearch programs — a bittersweet victory for a White House that will likely see much of its health care agenda unraveled by Republicans next year.

Like something out of a Bond movie, last weekend, the titans of the tech industry flew out to a
private island resort off the Georgia coast to meet with top Republicans
at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum. Though many topics
about governance and business were discussed, the Huffington Post reports that the “main topic” was stopping Donald Trump. At the forum, Karl Rove reportedly dissected Trump’s biggest weaknesses.

At a secret strategy meeting for millionaire and billionaire donors hosted by the Koch brothers, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) outlines his agenda should Republicans take control of the Senate in November.

Senate Democrats are facing growing pressure to break the white male stranglehold on senior staff positions in their ranks — a push that’s uniting consultants and lobbyists inside the Beltway with Black Lives Matter and other minority leaders who are accusing the party of “soft bigotry.“

The attacks are prompting uncomfortable discussions among Democrats even as they welcome their historic Senate freshman class, which includes the chamber’s first Latina and Indian-American members.

Frustrations over the lack of diversity among the ranks of top Senate Democratic aides began seeping into public view after Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss deprived the party’s donors and lobbyists of a critical opening to build on the Obama administration’s minority-hiring efforts. Now, activists are shamingSenate Democrats, noting that the chamber’s only African-American chief of staff works for Republican Sen. Tim Scott. And civil rights groups are holding a public conference call on Thursday to escalate their campaign for more diverse hiring by newly elected senators.

It’s not just the chief of staff disparity — minorities are under-represented throughout the ranks of Senate staffers. African-Americans and Latinos represent more than a third of self-identified Democrats nationwide but hold less than 3 percent of senior staff positions for Senate Democrats, according to a report last year by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

20-year-old Bernie Sanders organizing a protest against segregated university housing at his Alma mater, the University of Chicago in 1962

“We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments,” Sanders said at the protest. Sanders and 32 other students then entered the building and camped outside the president’s office, performing the first civil rights sit-in in Chicago history

Sanders is one of only two sitting United States Senators who was personally in attendance at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The other was Senator Mitch McConnell.

A child reportedly found a loaded Glock handgun in the bathroom suite of Republican House Speaker John Boehner in what is just the latest of a string of Capitol security missteps, Roll Call’s Hannah Hess reports. But this is not an isolated incident. In January, a member of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s security detail left a loaded gun wedged into the seat-cover dispenser in a Capitol Visitor Center bathroom. And in April, a janitor found a loaded Glock in plain sight while cleaning the Capitol Police headquarters.

When Sawyer asked if Jenner cheered when Obama became the first president to even say the word “transgender” in a State of the Union address, the 65-year-old replied that he “would certainly give him credit for that.”

“But not to get political,” Jenner continued, “I’ve never been a big fan, I’m kind of more on the conservative side.”

“Are your a Republican?” Sawyer asked in response, to which Jenner replied, “Yeah! Is that a bad thing? I believe in the constitution.”

“Do you think that would be an unsettling thing for some people in the conservative wing of the party?” Sawyer asked.

“I’ve thought about that,” says Jenner, adding that neither political party has a monopoly on understanding.

Sawyer then asked Jenner if he would go to Mitch McConell and John Boehner and ask them to help champion this cause. Jenner responded that he “would do that in a heartbeat, yes, and I think they would be very receptive.”

4.)
Army Corps of Engineers, which issued the permit allowing construction of the pipeline, even though it would cross under the Missouri River within a half-mile of the Sioux reservation boundary, at 202-761-5903.

AUDIT THE VOTE

Audit the vote will investigate not just the veracity of votes but also uncover voter suppression, voter purges, insecurities of our election system and find evidence of vulnerabilities to hacking, WHICH A RECOUNT WILL NOT DO.

- Lots of items on that list are still on-going/needs follow up, such as calling Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell; #StopBannon; supporting various civil rights organizations that will help the fight against Trump; monitoring Trump’s cabinet appointments; and various resources and tools for political activism.

If you haven’t had the chance to do some of the action items, you can still do so! If you already have, make the follow up phone calls! You can also send them letters.

GOP wants Congress to be on break by Dec. 9. They want to pass the CONGRESSIONAL REVIEW ACT by then to overturn Obama’s regulations in his last 60 days or anything he might do to minimize Trump admin ability to gut his policies. More specifically, they want to use CRA to get rid of the filibuster, so they can do anything they want without Democratic obstruction. Contact your Representatives to vote CRA down!